Saturday, May 24, 2008

Life's Too Short

I don't know if it's because I saw Before the Devil Knows You're Dead last night, but today I feel like my problems are small problems. Most of the people in that (well-made, seductively fucked-up) film are so overwhelmingly pathetic and desperate, it made me want to come straight home and hug my wife. (So I did, and she looked at me like I was insane.) But even if I just look around on this streetcar this evening, I see people who've got the sort of trouble I'll never know. Losing a well-paid university teaching gig stings a little, but at least I'm not a junkie cuckold who's planning to rob his own parents' jewelry store. Or a suffocating middle-aged guy trapped in a life he hates.

On the other hand, I do appear to be a middle-aged guy, and as Phil Hartman once said, "You know, when you hit forty, you're halfway home."

So I've decided that I'm gonna use these few weeks of unplanned unpaid vacation to do something I've been meaning to do for a long long time. I'm gonna publish my punk funk pigfuck rock photos. Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, Big Boys, George Clinton, Scratch Acid, Texas skinheads, My Bloody Valentine, Sun Ra--all the best sort of stuff. Not in a book, not anywhere fancy, just in a blog or at FlickR or some such. Maybe I'll make a two-dollar documentary out of them and put it on YouTube. Because I've been sitting on these goddamn amazing images for more than twenty years, and that's just stoopid. It's time for someone else to see them.